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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • From the perspective of somebody who’s actually hacked on Linux: Most Linux maintainers, like most programmers in general, are full of machismo stemming from the inherent difficulty of writing C. It is extremely difficult to write correct C and nobody can do it consistently, so those maintainers are heavily invested in the perception that they are skilled with C. Rust is much easier to write and democratizes kernel hacking, which is uncomfortable for older maintainers due to the standard teenagers-vs-parents social dynamics. Worse, adapting various kernel interfaces so that they are Rust-friendly has revealed that the pre- and postconditions of interface methods were not known before; there is existing sloppiness in the kernel’s internals which is only visible because of Rust-related cleanups.

    Note that Linux is not a GNU project. GNU’s kernel project is GNU Herd. “GNU/Linux” refers to Linux userlands populated with GNU packages. It’s important not to be distracted by this; the kernel is agnostic towards userland and generally is compatible with any loadable executable that uses Linux’s public syscall interface, so the entire discussion of Rust in the kernel is separate from anything going on in userland.

    Most siblings are wrong! PRs written in Rust can be rejected. There are already multiple non-C languages in the kernel. Rust is sufficiently available on the platforms where it will be required for building kernel. Maintainers are only added after they have shown themselves to be socially reliable and they can be removed by other maintainers if they are unresponsive. The only correct sibling points out that Rust is different.




  • I think that there are two pieces to it. There’s tradition, of course, but I don’t think that that’s a motive. Also, some folks will argue that not taking hands off the keyboard, not going to a mouse, is an advantage; I’m genuinely not sure about that. Finally, I happen to have decent touch typing; this test tells me 87 WPM @ 96% accuracy.

    First, I don’t spend that much time at the text editor. Most of my time is either at a whiteboard, synchronizing designs and communicating with coworkers, or reading docs. I’d estimate that maybe 10-20% of my time is editing text. Moreover, when I’m writing docs or prose, I don’t need IDE features at all; at those times, I enable vim’s spell check and punch the keys, and I’d like my text editor to not get in the way. In general, I think of programming as Naur’s theory-building process, and I value my understanding of the system (or my user’s understanding, etc.) over any computer-rendered view of the system.

    Second, when I am editing text, I have a planned series of changes that I want to make. Both Emacs and vim descend from lineages of editors (TECO and ed respectively) which are built out of primitive operations on text buffers. Both editors allow macro-instructions, today called macros, which are programmable sequences of primitive operations. In vim, actions like reflowing a paragraph (gqap) or deleting everything up to the next semicolon and switching to insert mode (ct;) are actually sentences of a vim grammar which has its own verbs and nouns.

    As a concrete example, I’m currently hacking Linux kernel because I have some old patches that I am forward-porting. From the outside, my workflow looks like staring out the window for several minutes, opening vim and editing less than one line over the course of about twenty seconds, and restarting a kernel build. From the inside, I read the error message from the previous kernel build, jump to the indicated line in vim with g, and edit it to not have an error. Most of my time is spent legitimately slacking multitasking. This is how we bring up hardware for the initial boot and driver development too.

    Third! This isn’t universal for Linux hackers. I make programming languages. Right now, I’m working with a Smalltalk-like syntax which compiles to execline. There’s no IDE for execline and Smalltalks famously invented self-hosted IDEs, so there’s no existing IDE which magically can assist me; I’d have to create my own IDE. With vim, I can easily reuse existing execline and Smalltalk syntax highlighting, which is all I really want for code legibility. This lets me put most of my time where it should go: thinking about possibilities and what could be done next.


  • Corbin@programming.devtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devIt do be like that
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    3 months ago

    So, you’ve never known any Unix hackers? I worked for a student datacenter when I was at university, and we were mostly vim users; as far as text-editor diversity, we did have one guy who was into emacs and another who preferred nano. After that, I went to work at Google, where I continued to use vim. As far as fancy IDE features, I do use syntax highlighting and I know how to use the spell checker but I don’t use autocomplete. I’ve heard of neovim but don’t have a good reason to try it out yet; maybe next decade?


  • Hi! You are bullshitting us. To understand your own incorrectness, please consider what a chatbot should give as an answer to the following questions which I gave previously, on Lobsters:

    • Is the continuum hypothesis true?
    • Is the Goldbach conjecture true?
    • Is NP contained in P?
    • Which of Impagliazzo’s Five Worlds do we inhabit?

    The biggest questions in mathematics do not fit nicely into the chatbot paradigm and demonstrate that LLMs lack intelligence (whatever that is). I wrote about Somebody Else’s Paper, but it applies to you too:

    This attempt doesn’t quite get over the epistemological issue that something can be true or false, determined and decided, prior to human society learning about it and incorporating it into training data.

    Also, on a personal note, I recommend taking a writing course and organizing your thoughts prior to writing long posts for other people. Your writing voice is not really yours, but borrowed from chatbots; I suspect that you’re about halfway down the path that I described previously, on Lobsters. This is reversible but you have to care about yourself.


  • Secondarily, you are the first person to give me a solid reason as to why the current paradigm is unworkable. Despite my mediocre recall I have spent most of my life studying AI well before all this LLM stuff, so I like to think I was at least well educated on the topic at one point.

    Unfortunately it seems that your education was missing the foundations of deep learning. PAC learning is the current meta-framework, it’s been around for about four decades, and at its core is the idea that even the best learners are not guaranteed to learn the solution to a hard problem.

    I am somewhat curious about what architecture changes need to be made to allow for actual problem solving.

    First, convince us that humans are actual problem solvers. The question is begged; we want computers to be intelligent but we didn’t check whether humans were intelligent before deciding that we would learn intelligence from human-generated data.







  • I want you to write kernel code for a few years. But we go to Lemmy with the machismo we have, not the machismo we wish we had. Write a JSON recognizer; it should have the following signature and correctly recognize ECMA 404, returning 0 on success and 1 on failure.

    int recognizeJSON(const char*);
    

    I estimate that this should take you about 120 lines of code. My prior estimated defect rate for C programs is about one per 60 lines. So, to get under par, your code should have fewer than two bugs.



  • They had you right the first time. You have a horde of accounts and your main approach is to post Somebody Else’s Opinion for engagement. You have roughly the political sophistication of a cornstalk and you don’t read the articles that you submit. You don’t engage on anything you’ve posted except to defend your style of posting. There’s no indication that you produce Free Software. You use Lemmy like Ghislane Maxwell used Reddit.


  • This is too facile. First, in terms of capability maturity, management is not the goal of a fully-realized line of industry. Instead, the end is optimization, a situation where everything is already repeatable, defined, and managed; in this situation, our goal is to increase, improve, and simplify our processes. In stark contrast, management happens prior to those goals; the goal of management is to predict, control, and normalize processes.

    Second, management is the only portion of a business which is legible to the government. The purpose of management is to be taxable, accountable, and liable, not to handle the day-to-day labors of the business. The Iron Law insists that the business will divide all employees into the two camps of manager and non-manager based solely on whether they are employed in pursuit of this legibility.

    Third, consider labor as prior to employment; after all, sometimes people do things of their own cognizance without any manager telling them what to do. So, everybody is actually a non-manager at first! It’s only in the presence of businesses that we have management, and only in the presence of capitalism that we have owners. Consider that management inherits the same issues of top-down command-and-control hierarchy as ownership or landlording.